When facilitating sustainable watershed and environmental management at large institutions emphasize:
To help landowners learn new information, about riparian areas, landowners prefer that staff characteristics include knowledge about riparian management and understanding of the practicalities of living and working near riparian areas. Continue reading →
Participating as part of community and watershed groups is more likely to lead to learning new information and making management changes. Continue reading →
When working on riparian issues, employ multiple interactions and a mix of many extension methods to offer opportunities for diverse information and ideas and methods of providing them, and to meet individualized learning needs. Methods may include presentations, field days, workshops, individual landowner visits, riparian health inventories and reports, written materials, technical advice, and web site information on riparian areas and grazing management. Continue reading →
When working on riparian issues, give the community the opportunity to build a relationship with extension staff, to build trust and understanding, and to allow enough time for multiple interactions to occur. Continue reading →
When working on riparian issues, allow the local community to drive the process, identify the timelines, and identify the way in which they wish to manage riparian areas. Use awareness, team and tool building, community-based action, and monitoring. Continue reading →
To facilitate students’ ability to conceptualize the groundwater environment, teach instructors the fundamentals of assessing for conceptual understanding of science concepts. For example, the teacher can identify what language the students are using to describe groundwater and consequently what possible alternative conceptions may need to be explicitly addressed. Continue reading →
To facilitate students’ ability to conceptualize the groundwater environment, engage teachers in learning how to develop appropriate assessment materials. For example, model use of preassessment to assess students’ groundwater understandings using various types of multiplechoice items, open-ended questions, and drawing prompts. Ask teachers to analyze what types of information each item provides and construct an appropriateinstructional plan based on the responses. Continue reading →
To increase understanding of complex concepts related to groundwater:
Encourage water utilities to adopt a risk management strategy and to identify strategic risks, such as risks to a safe, acceptable, and reliable water supply. Risks for this category, for example, can include failure to meet requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act; inappropriate catchment management; and failure to plan for growth and changes in demand. [NOTE: Finding based on one case study.]
